Did you know that your child is constantly data mined? Adrienne Hill writes about how extensively most children are now tracked, usually without their parent’s knowledge or consent. The federal government has given states hundreds of millions of dollars to help build a giant database, called a “statewide longitudinal data system.”

Hill writes:

“The government isn’t the only one trying to figure out what’s working by investing in and gobbling up data about your kid.

“Sales of educational technology software for kids in kindergarten through high school reached nearly $8 billion last year, according to the Software and Information Industry Association.

“One of the biggest players is the field is Knewton. It analyzes student data that it collects by keeping track of nearly every click and keystroke your child makes during digital lessons.

“Jose Ferreira is Knewton’s CEO. In a video posted by the Department of Education, he says “We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything.”

“Knewton claims to gather millions of data points on millions of children each day. Ferreira calls education “the world’s most data-mineable industry by far.”

“We have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has,” he says in the video. “We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close.”

“Five orders of magnitude more data than Google is a whole lot of data.

“The promise is that all that data can be used to tailor lessons to individual kids, to their strengths and weaknesses. They will become better learners, and that will lead to higher grades and better graduation rates.

“Ferreira imagines a day when “you tell us what you had for breakfast every morning at the beginning of the semester, by the end of the semester, we should be able to tell you what you had for breakfast. Because you always did better on the days you had scrambled eggs.”

“If the right breakfast makes for a better behaved child, that will be measured, too.”

And more:

“We live in a 24/7 data mining universe today,” says Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media. “And I think most of us parents and teachers and kids don’t realize how much of our data is out there and used by other people.”

“Steyer is also a parent. He says what worries him most is that “information that’s very personal to me and my family, for example my kids disciplinary record or health record or something like that, is made available to somebody who it’s no business to have that.”

What will be done with all this data? Sell stuff to your child? Monitor her behavior? For what ends? For whose benefit? What brave new world is this?